Never There Yet: Possibility and the Limits of Institutional Curating (Sternberg Press / Thoughts on Curating)

Twenty-five years inside European art institutions to ask what lies beyond their limits.

How can curating produce possibility? Charles Esche has spent twenty-five years asking that question, first inside European art institutions—as a museum director and curator of biennials—and now from outside institutional forms altogether. In Never There Yet, Esche traces the changing locations of curatorial possibility across a quarter century of cultural and political transformation in Europe. Along the way, he revisits exhibitions that defined his directorship of the Van Abbemuseum—Be(com)ing Dutch, Forms of Resistance, Museum of Arte Útil, and Soils—alongside biennials in Istanbul, Ramallah, and São Paulo, and the formation of the museum confederation L’Internationale. What emerges is both a diagnosis and a proposition. The reform imaginary that shaped European art institutions during the 1990s has reached its limit, eroded by austerity, market capture, the rise of an oligarch collector class, and the institutions’ incapacity to absorb what its overseers and publics ask of it. But possibility has not disappeared. Esche writes from Amsterdam and from the Three Ashes Foundation, a land-based project outside Bucharest, where he is working with others to formulate what a communal art institute might look like.

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